This examination of the denial of genocide atVisegrad looks at three specific examples: a documentary called ”Na Drini Grobnica”(”Grave on the river Drina”), the works of Momir Krsmanovic, a Serb writer from Visegrad, and the Visegrad report of the Committee for Collecting Data on Crimes Committed Against Humanity and International Law.

1.”Na Drini Grobnica” is a documentary produced by the so-called Concentration Camp Survivors from Republika Srpska organization (”Saveza logoraša Republike Srpske”), featuring the organisation’s Visegrad section (”Regionalnog udruženja logoraša iz Višegrada”). It was produced in 2007 and since then has been repeatedly aired on Republika Srpska TV as well as being available online. One of the people who worked on this ‘documentary’ was Slavko Heleta, a journalist in Visegrad. In addition to making this documentary, they have also organized two conferences on ”Crimes committed against Serbs in Upper Podrinje”. The organization is very close to the SNSD (Alliance of Independent Social Democrats), the party of Republika Srpska Prime Minister and genocide denier Milorad Dodik. The organization’s former vice-president Slavko Jovicic Slavuj, now a member of the Bosnia and Herzegovina Parliament, voted along with all the other Serb representatives in the BH Parliament against proposed legislation that would outlaw Holocaust and Genocide denial. The proposed legislation was based on the EU Framework Decision on Combating Racism and Xenophobia.

2. Momir Krsmanovic, is a notorious Serb author from Visegrad. He wrote the popular novel ”’Even God wept over Eastern Bosnia” (”I Bog je zaplakao nad Istocnom Bosnom”) which deals with ”crimes against the Serb people in Eastern Bosnia”. According to his offical website (http://www.momir-krsmanovic.com/), Momir Krsmanovic was a survivor of Ustasa crimes committed at Sjemec near Visegrad in 1941. He survived these atrocities because ”Almigthy looked after him”. He boasts that he was able to write ”Even God wept over Eastern Bosnia” in a monastery on Mount Ozren thanks to Vasilija Kacavenda, the infamous Bishop of Zvornik who was very close to Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. Kacavenda built his own residence on confiscated Bosniak property in Zvornik and is notorious for refusing to remove the Church built on the property of Nana Fata (”Granny Fata”) near Srebrenica.

Krsmanovic publicly brags about his close connections with the Orthodox Church (see here). His book is written as a historical novel, supposedly based on eye-witness accounts. It makes no mention of Serb crimes, instead Krsmanovic describes Bosniaks slaughtering Serbs and dumping them in the Drina river, rapes by Bosniaks etc. The novel is fascist propaganda aimed at young Serbs in Eastern Bosnia, like the film ”Pretty Village, Pretty Flame”. Krsmanovic is also the author of ”The Blood-Stained Hands of Islam”, ”The Bloody Drina Flows” etc.

3. TheCommittee for Collecting Data on Crimes Committed Against Humanity and International Law was formed during the war with the primary aim of spreading propaganda about crimes committed against Serbs in Bosnia. The committee produced a report on every town, especially Visegrad. These reports were used by Slobodan Milosevic’s defense at The Hague and can be found online. The committee gathered information from the courts in Visegrad. Two names recur: Judge Radmila Radisavljevic (later Zeljko Lelek’s defense lawyer) and Prosecutor Lazar Drasko (later a defense witness for Milan Lukic in the Sjeverin trial). Drasko is still a prosecutor in the Bosnian Federal courts and the authorities have ignored victims’ calls for his suspension. Radisaljevic is working as a lawyer in Visegrad. It is important to note that neither comes from Visegrad – Drasko is from Capljina and Radisaljevic from Zenica. Victims have repeatedly called for the criminal prosecution of both, but the authorities have ignored those calls. The most infamous case involving these two is that of Abdullah Kahriman, a Bosnian Army soldier captured by the Bosnian Serb Army near Visegrad. Kahriman escaped from Visegrad in ’92 and joined the resistance. He was captured, interrogated by the Visegrad authorities, tortured and forced to confess to war crimes. His forced confession is used by the Committee and also used in the propagandist documentary ”Grave on the River Drina”. His whereabouts are unknown. He was last seen in Visegrad, in the custody of the court authorities. He was probably murdered.

These are the three sources of information concerning Visegrad or Eastern Bosnia to be found on Serb websites. More recent evidence of genocide denial by Visegrad Serbs can be found in comments in Internet forums, Facebook discussion groups etc.: ”What happened, happened! Let’s look towards the future”, ”The war ended 15 years ago. Don’t talk about it!”, ”I really don’t know why you people left, you are welcome to return any time”, ”We all committed crimes, now let’s not talk about it”.

There is another aspect of denial that particularly concerns Visegrad – the Lukicization of war crimes. This is the tendency to place the blame for every war crime committed in Visegrad on Milan Lukic. It seems now that Lukic himself ordered and executed every crime committed in Visegrad. But don’t forget, Milan Lukic was a member of the Visegrad Brigade of the Bosnian Serb Army. This is an established fact, mentioned at the Sjeverin trial and confirmed by Branimir Savovic (SDS President) and Luka Dragicevic (Commander of the Visegrad Brigade). Lukic had a superior. He received orders and he obeyed orders. There is a chain of responsibility behind the commission of these crimes.

And finally, last but not least, it is worth repeating that the main role in the Visegrad genocide was played by the Crisis Committee in the Visegrad Municipality.

This new mass grave was located in Straziste cemetery. The site was covered with garbage. Among the remains of Bosniak victims were roof tiles, rubbish and especially lime. Information about this mass grave was given by local Serbs: a dying Serb who was witness to the disposal of these bodies.

I have been contacted by a number of people regarding Amnesty International’s invitation to Professor Noam Chomsky to lecture in Northern Ireland.

The communications I have received regard Prof. Chomsky’s role in revisionism in the story of the concentration camps in northwestern Bosnia in 1992, which it was my accursed honour to discover.

As everyone interested knows, a campaign was mounted to try and de-bunk the story of these murderous camps as a fake – ergo, to deny and/or justify them – the dichotomy between these position still puzzles me.

The horror of what happened at Omarska and Trnopolje has been borne out by painful history, innumerable trials at the Hague, and – most importantly by far – searing testimony from the survivors and the bereaved. These were places of extermination, torture, killing, rape and, literally “concentration” prior to enforced deportation, of people purely on grounds of ethnicity.

Prof. Chomsky was not among those (“Novo” of Germany and “Living Marxism” in the UK) who first proposed the idea that these camps were a fake. He was not among those who tried unsuccessfully (they were beaten back in the High Court in London, by a libel case taken by ITN) to put up grotesque arguments about fences around the camps, which were rather like Fred Leuchter’s questioning whether the thermal capacity of bricks was enough to contain the heat needed to gas Jews at Auschwitz. But Professor Chomsky said many things, from his ivory tower at MIT, to spur them on and give them the credibility and energy they required to spread their poisonous perversion and denials of these sufferings. Chomsky comes with academic pretensions, doing it all from a distance, and giving the revisionists his blessing. And the revisionists have revelled in his endorsement.

In an interview with the Guardian, Professor Chomsky paid me the kind compliment of calling me a good journalist, but added that on this occasion (the camps) I had “got it wrong”. Got what wrong?!?! Got wrong what we saw that day, August 5th 1992 (I didn’t see him there)? Got wrong the hundreds of thousands of families left bereaved, deported and scattered asunder? Got wrong the hundreds of testimonies I have gathered on murderous brutality? Got wrong the thousands whom I meet when I return to the commemorations? If I am making all this up, what are all the human remains found in mass graves around the camps and so painstakingly re-assembled by the International Commission for Missing Persons?

These people pretend neutrality over Bosnia, but are actually apologists for the Milosevic/Karadzic/Mladic plan, only too pathetic to admit it. And the one thing they never consider from their armchairs is the ghastly, searing, devastating impact of their game on the survivors and the bereaved. The pain they cause is immeasurable. This, along with the historical record, is my main concern. It is one thing to survive the camps, to lose one’s family and friends – quite another to be told by a bunch of academics with a didactic agenda in support of the pogrom that those camps never existed. The LM/Novo/Chomsky argument that the story of the camps was somehow fake has been used in countless (unsuccessful) attempts to defend mass murderers in The Hague.

For decades I have lived under the impression that Amnesty International was opposed to everything these people stand for, and existed to defend exactly the kind of people who lost their lives, family and friends in the camps and at Srebrenica three years later, a massacre on which Chomsky has also cast doubt. I have clearly been deluded about Amnesty. For Amnesty International, of all people, to honour this man is to tear up whatever credibility they have estimably and admirably won over the decades, and to reduce all they say hitherto to didactic nonsense.

Why Amnesty wants to identify with and endorse this revisionist obscenity, I do not know. It is baffling and grotesque. By inviting Chomsky to give this lecture, Amnesty condemns itself to ridicule at best, hurtful malice at worst – Amnesty joins the revisionists in spitting on the graves of the

dead. Which was not what the organisation was, as I understand, set up for. I have received a letter from an Amnesty official in Northern Ireland which reads rather like a letter from Tony Blair’s office after it has been caught out cosying up to British Aerospace or lying over the war in Iraq –

it is a piece of corporate gobbledygook, distancing Amnesty from Chomsky’s views on Bosnia, or mealy-mouthedly conceding that they are disagreed with.

There is no concern at all with the victims, which is, I suppose, what one would expect from a bureaucrat. In any event, the letter goes nowhere towards addressing the revisionism, dispelling what will no doubt be a fawning, self-satisfied introduction in Belfast and rapturous applause for

the man who gives such comfort to Messrs Karadzic and Mladic, and their death squads. How far would Amnesty go in inviting and honouring speakers whose views it does not necessarily share, in the miserable logic of this AI official in Belfast? A lecture by David Irving on Joseph Goebbels?

Alistair Campbell on how Saddam really did have those WMD? The Chilean Secret Police or Colonel Oliver North on the communist threat in Latin America during the 70s and 80s? What about Karadzic himself on the “Jihadi” threat in Bosnia, and the succulence of 14-year-old girls kept in rape camps?

I think I am still a member of AI – if so, I resign. If not, thank God for that. And to think: I recently came close to taking a full time job as media director for AI. That was a close shave – what would I be writing now, in the press release: “Come and hear the great Professor Chomsky inform you all that the stories about the camps in Bosnia were a lie – that I was hallucinating that day, that the skeletons of the dead so meticulously re-assembled by the International Commission for Missing Persons are all plastic? That the dear friends I have in Bosnia, the USA, the UK and elsewhere who struggle to put back together lives that were broken by Omarska and Trnopolje are making it all up?

Some press release that would have been. Along with the owner of the site of the Omarska camp, the mighty Mittal Steel Corporation, Amnesty International would have crushed it pretty quick. How fitting that Chomsky and Mittal Steel find common cause. Yet how logical, and to me, obvious. After all, during the Bosnian war, it was the British Foreign Office, the CIA, the UN and great powers who, like the revisionists Chomsky champions, most eagerly opposed any attempt to stop the genocide that lasted, as it was encouraged by them and their allies in high politics to last, for three bloody years from 1992 until the Srebrenica massacre of 1995.

Barimo, a all- Bosniak village near Visegrad, was attacked by Bosnian Serb Army forces in August 1992. 26 Bosniak civilians were killed and the village was set ablaze. A few days ago, survivors of this crime came back to open a monument to their loved ones. The monument was opened by Emina Bajric, one of the rare survivors of the massacre.

Image: Article about the opening of this monument in Dnevni Avaz.

This was one of the worst massacres in the Visegrad Genocide, the ages of victims was from 1900 to 1980, a large number of these victims are women and children. The oldest victim was 92 years old and the youngest 12 years old:
1. Bajrić Omera Mustafa, 1930;

2. Bajrić Džemila, 1918;

3. Bajrić Hrustema Džemila, 1935;

4. Bajrić Mustafe Fadil, 1957;

5. Bajrić Mustafe Nijaz, 1965;

6.Bajrić Fadila Emir, 1980;

7. Bosankić Hadžira, 1913;

8. Bosankić Ibrahima Muša, 1940;

9. Samardžić Smail, 1912;

10. Samardžić Đeše Munira, 1927;

11. Beha Ibrana Ćamila, 1941;

12. Beha Bege Sabaheta, 1968;

13. Beha Bege Hidajeta, 1976;

14. Šabanović Razija, 1933;

15. Kos Sulejmana Vejsil, 1932;

16. Kos Sulejmana Slakan, 1951;

17. Tvrtković Ćamil Muharem, 1933;

18. Puhel Hrustema Kadesa, 1928,;

19. Kurtalić Adila, 1948;

20. Kahriman Dervo, rođen 1938,;

21. Menzilović Huso, rođen 1938;

22. Menzilović Huse Suad, 1968, ;

23. Zuban Mušan Ibrahim, 1953;

24. Zuban Mušan, 1912 ;

25. Zuban Sabira, 1961;

26. Halilović Hanka, 1900.

Image: The opening of the monument in Barimo.

Image: Bosniak Genocide survivors, praying in front of the ruins of the Barimo islamic school (mekteb) which was destroyed by Bosnian Serb Army during it’s attack on Barimo in August 1992. Read more on destruction of mosques in Visegrad Municipality here.

We earlier wrote about a new mass grave in Visegrad. The new mass grave was located in Straziste cemetery.The site was covered with garbage. Among the remains of Bosniak victims were roof tiles, rubbish and especially lime.Information about this mass grave was given by local Serbs: a dying Serb who was witness to the disposal of these bodies.

Image: Exhumation at a mass grave in Visegrad, where bodies of Bosniak civilians were dumped. This mass grave was found thanks to information given by a dying Serb.

Image: Exhumation at a mass grave in Visegrad, where bodies of Bosniak civilians were dumped. This mass grave was found thanks to information given by a dying Serb.

Image: Exhumation at a mass grave in Visegrad, where bodies of Bosniak civilians were dumped. This mass grave was found thanks to information given by a dying Serb.

Image: Exhumation at a mass grave in Visegrad, where bodies of Bosniak civilians were dumped. This mass grave was found thanks to information given by a dying Serb.

Image: Exhumation at a mass grave in Visegrad, where bodies of Bosniak civilians were dumped. This mass grave was found thanks to information given by a dying Serb.

Image: Exhumation at a mass grave in Visegrad, where bodies of Bosniak civilians were dumped. This mass grave was found thanks to information given by a dying Serb.

Image: Exhumation at a mass grave in Visegrad, where bodies of Bosniak civilians were dumped. This mass grave was found thanks to information given by a dying Serb.

Image: Exhumation at a mass grave in Visegrad, where bodies of Bosniak civilians were dumped. This mass grave was found thanks to information given by a dying Serb.

We call upon all who know the identity of Bosniaks murdered in Zijad Koric’s cafe in Nova Mahala street in Visegrad. There were around 4-5 persons murdered in the cafe. Hajra Koric, Zijad’s wife, survived this massacre, but was later shot and killed by Milan Lukic on Bikavac.

Father and son – Himzo and Ahmet Omerovic have gone missing since the Visegrad Genocide. Their fate is unknown and their remains have not been found. According to some witnesses, both Himzo and Ahmet were detained in Uzamnica concentration camp, while according to others, Ahmet was arrested in Jondja street where he was hiding. He was supposedly last seen, covered in blood, leaving the Police Station.

Image: Nurko Dervisevic

According to Nurko Dervisevic, a Hague witness, Ahmet Omerovic was held in Uzamnica and taken away by Milan Lukic:

” He called out Enes

3 Dzaferovic and his brother and another young man, Omerovic, the son of

4 Himzo Omerovic, and said, “You are going for the weekend to Bajina

5 Basta,” and he took those three men away. ”

We ask anyone has any information about the whereabouts of Himzo and Ahmet Omerovic to leave a comment or send us an email.